I came up the so-called traditional route.
In 2002, I sold my first short stories to small press and semi-pro markets. I’m talking about ink on paper. Eventually I cracked into pro magazines. Then
I graduated to novels, found an agent, and sold post-apocalyptic thriller Plague
Year in a minor bidding war. This
was 2007. It felt like the big time. There was a film option and several foreign language
deals.

To their credit, Penguin did everything right in packaging Plague Year. The cover art is provocative. They wrote awesome back jacket copy and added
the world’s greatest tagline in blood red: The Next Breath You Take Will Kill You.

Then they dumped 40,000 copies on co-op displays nationwide.

That’s what a Big 5 publisher is supposed to do — rule the monopoly. Plague
Year went to a second printing, a third, a fifth, an eighth. Shouldn’t this have been a fairytale? The collapse of the global economy in 2008 is
partly what derailed my cinderella story, but, inexplicably, they backed off of
my success instead of running with it.

Also in 2007, I’d sold a story called The
Frozen Sky to a top anthology. Because
the story is a near future sci fi thriller, which I consider my meat and bread,
I asked my editor if she’d like a full-fledged novel of The
Frozen Sky as our follow-up to Plague Year. I thought I knew my readership. She said no.

Penguin wanted a sequel, and I loved my characters (the ones who’d survived,
ha ha). Eager to find out what happened to
them next, I wrote Plague War,
then Plague
Zone. Suddenly we had a nice
trilogy.

The corporate machine did some things well.
The covers for War and Zone are perfect. Unfortunately, the jacket copy they wrote for
War was mediocre. Yes, the trilogy is a dark tale of doomsday,
but their description emphasized the negatives.
It described how the heroes would confront the very worst of human
nature whereas my focus was on everything that makes people great in the face
of terrible challenges — determination, loyalty, cleverness, and sacrifice.

My agent warned me not to rock the boat.
Don’t be a troublemaker, he said.
The obvious joke is troublemaker
is my middle name. I made a polite stink
about miscasting the book. In the end, I
fought them to a draw. They grudgingly
rewrote two sentences while sending me several emails to explain the expense of
doing so. Really? Changing two sentences is expensive?

A month later, we hit our next hurdle.
Overseas, Plague Year was a
hardcover bestseller in Spain. It had
verged on genre lists in the U.S. It
sold well in Germany and the Czech Republic.
I asked Penguin to hype the sequel by adding “International bestseller”
to my byline.

No. Too expensive.

Then War became a finalist for the
Philip K. Dick Award, not a small honor in science fiction — but they said they
couldn’t put any mention of it on the cover of Zone. Too expensive. They
said the artwork would be the artwork with no special design work.

Do the words “Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award” need designing?

Meanwhile I’d always kept one eye over my shoulder wondering I could do with The
Frozen Sky. By then, publishers’ staffs
had been cut to the bone, there were fewer shelves for books, Kindle had blown
the doors off the barn, and I knew exactly what New York had to offer. For a low five-figure advance (low enough to
verge on four figures), they’d lock up print and ebook rights for ten years,
maybe longer, while fighting me every step of the way over presentation.

I
self-published The
Frozen Sky in October 2012. During the first
few months, sales were slow as word spread.
Then it took off.

Since January, it’s sold 24,000 copies. Not
bad. Following the lead of King Kong Joe
Konrath, I’ve experimented with price points from 99c to $3.99 with most of my
success at $2.99. The best part is
reaching audiences around the world. My
agents are gabberflasted.

Here’s the thing. My editor at Penguin
was almost right. Plague Year reads like the love child of Crichton crossed with King
whereas The
Frozen Sky is pure high tech sf in the vein of Aliens
or Pitch Black. If you’d enjoy a futuristic mind bend about smart
people exploring an ice moon packed with freaky blind monsters and lost
civilizations, this is your book. But
the marketing team in New York was never going to break stride from “Carlson
writes tech thrillers” to “Carlson also writes hard sf.”

Why not?

They’re publishing too many books and they don’t have enough staff. The corporate machine really is set up like a
machine. In my day, so long ago in 2007, the Great And Powerful
Marketing knew all. Marketing dealt with other marketing heads in other
corporate environments like Barnes & Noble, Borders, Tower, Target, and
Wal-Mart. Even now, their computers match numbers with other computers;
the computers want simple, readily identifiable brands; and if this smacks of 1984or Fahrenheit
451, try not to think too hard about it.

Penguin would have been happy with Plague
Year #4. I could have written that
series until my eyeballs hemorrhaged while they left the books on autopilot,
and I considered it. I had an absolute
blast writing the first three titles. Blowing
up the world is fun. I also learned many
interesting things about myself and how I view society and relationships as
well as awesome freak-outs like ant swarms, limited nuclear strikes, and bad
guys dropping out of the sky in hazmat suits and paragliders. But I wanted to do more than stay in the same
storyline forever. I wanted to grow.

Interrupt is the epic disaster thriller
I read as a boy like Lucifer’s Hammer or
The Stand. It’s more ambitious than anything I’ve done
yet — larger in its cast of characters, in scope, and in page count.

My agent took Interrupt to New York because I
believe in the hybrid approach. The
manuscript made New York nervous because a large page count means larger
pre-production costs, print costs, warehouse, shipping, returns, you know the
drill. At the same time, we approached
Amazon, whose Seattle-based imprints are the new 1200 pound gorilla in
publishing.

Guess who
wasn’t afraid of print costs because their corporate machine is a lean fighting
unit based on the new economy and new media?

Working with 47North is a pleasure. They
actively sought my input on jacket copy because, you know, I’m a writer. What a strange idea! They paid an artist to draft several cover
concepts and asked me to collaborate on fine-tuning their approach. Interruptis a tough book to capture
in a single image. What do you go with? A flaring sun?
Neanderthal warriors? Navy
pilots?

The
burning orange eye promises chaos and transformation. I freakin’ love it. I’m excited indeed to partner with a
twenty-first century publisher, and I want to thank everyone who’s helped me
walk this complicated path.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.Joe sez: I wish I could say Jeff's experiences with legacy publishing were unusual. And I suppose they were sort of unusual, in the sense that he was screwed in a unique way. But being screwed by publishers isn't unusual or unique. I lost count of the times someone in publishing thought they new better than I did and prevented something I knew would help sales. My vindication comes from getting my rights back and doing it myself and proving that my way was the right way.In some cases, publishers actually meant well, thought they knew better, and exerted the power authors gave them when signing that lopsided, unconscionable contract. But a well-intentioned doctor who has no clue what he's doing can hurt you or kill you.In some cases, apathy coupled with a giant industry that treats books like interchangeable cogs, hurts authors. Authors, and books, aren't interchangeable. In some cases, publishers were downright evil. The term robber baron comes to mind. Often it was a combination of the above. But I've seen the end result countless times. The author is left wondering WTF happened, and then justifiably liberated when an alternative comes along.I'm fine with blaming publishers for their treatment of authors and books, but I have a harder time blaming individuals who work within that system. On the contrary, almost every publishing pro I've worked with has been smart, pleasant, with good intentions. They really thought they knew better, and to a certain extent, they did. Books are commodities subject to the rules of supply and demand, and after decades of publishing books, publishers more or less learned how to sell them. So they did things that worked before, avoided things they'd tried but didn't work, and tried to keep the conveyor belt running while staying profitable.The problem with the "one size fits all" mentality is that books are an unreproduceable phenomenon. I knew this back in 2007. Publishers, however, haven't changed their strategy. And they remain clueless about how to succeed in the future.Markus Dohle, the new CEO of the recently merged Random Penguins, recently said this:“I’m optimistic that we can have more loyalty than Amazon,” he says. “Loyalty in terms of the personalities of our authors. You can be loyal to Amazon because you can get a new tennis racquet in 24 hours, free freight. But you’re not being loyal to them on a more visceral level.”That quote is a plateful of fail with a sidedish of stupid. Customers are loyal to Amazon because Amazon has been working for two decades to the the most customer-centric company on the planet. Amazon keeps raising the bar for customer service and experience, and does everything it can to care for and cultivate customers. They innovate, they keep prices low, they ship quickly, they offer a huge selection of tangible and digital goods, and most of all they listen to what customers want.Amazon has said, many times, that authors are customers, and treats them accordingly.So customers are loyal to Amazon. They are not loyal to Random Penguins. I'd wager 98 out of 100 people have no clue who publishes the Big 5 authors they read. I'd wager they don't care, either.Because customers aren't loyal to publishers. They're loyal to authors.Why does Dohle persist in the belief that Random Penguins will forever have a renewing crop of authors to exploit when more and more authors are finding happier, greener pastures by leaving the Big 5?Dohle, and the industry, are suffering from something called existence bias. That's when a company (Kodak is a good example) believes they will continue to thrive because they've thrived in the past. This becomes a problem because keeping the status quo is the company's goal, rather than innovation that will keep them relevant.When Amazon introduced the Kindle, they introduced a disruptive technology that took power away from the Big 5, who had wielded that power for decades, and put it in the hands of costumers--readers and authors.Random Penguins is a middleman. A middleman who takes a ridiculously large percentage of ebook royalties for doing very little.If Dohle wants to succeed, it isn't going to be by having a confrontational relationship with Amazon (who is the largest seller of Random Penguins books). The Big 5 need to understand that without authors, they'll have nothing to sell. Amazon inspires customer loyalty. Authors inspire customer loyalty. This is truly a visceral loyalty. The only people loyal to publishers are those who work for them.

24 comments:

Jeff, thanks for sharing your story. It's obvious you are writing books people want to read! Congrats on your success and I'm sure you will continue to prosper :-)

Joe, I just saw this morning that BookCountry, RandomPenguin's laughable self pub arm is launching their own ebook store with distribution options ala Smashwords and Draft2Digital. So, I guess RandomPenguins wants to be a supplier AND a competitor of Amazon's. Wonder how that's going to turn out.

“I’m optimistic that we can have more loyalty than Amazon,” he says. “Loyalty in terms of the personalities of our authors. You can be loyal to Amazon because you can get a new tennis racquet in 24 hours, free freight. But you’re not being loyal to them on a more visceral level.”

I wanted to stick a fork in my eye. On what planet does this guy live? (Maybe Jeff can answer that one, lol.) Anyway, Joe, you've got it exactly right. I've never had a problem returning things to Amazon. Ever.

Just recently, one of my bosses needed to find a wire for some high tech gadget. Ordered for her off Amazon. Tried to use the wire at an educational conference, but she said it didn't work.

I printed out a return label, stuck it on a package, and a few days later, her cc was credited.

No muss, no fuss.

And you're also right that readers are loyal to WRITERS.

It's statements like the above that make you wonder how the trad publishers have stayed in business for so long.

I am loyal to Amazon because they're easy to work with and they treat me right! When I buy things (and I buy pretty much every book from Amazon as well as lots of other stuff), and as I'm learning to self-publish. It's great. They treat me with respect. I've heard bad things about Amazon from other people, but from my own experience, they treat me like a queen!

Just curious, but did you choose the $3.99 price point for INTERRUPT, or did 47 North? My Thomas and Mercer titles have all been released at $4.99, and I've been thinking they might do better priced a dollar cheaper.

I don't actually feel badly used. The relationship became more one of weird neglect? And a King Kong Joe said, almost every publishing pro I've worked with has been smart and pleasant with good intentions. I just got lost in the flood of material, which was frustrating and bewildering and a shame. Admiration is what I felt for my senior editor, and my first book had a publicist whose entire list would have followed into the gates of hell. But she left before me for motivations not unlike mine.

Jude, the $3.99 price point was not my decision and one of the few aspects of the book re: which I was not consulted, which is fine.

This is heresy, I know, ha ha, but at some point you have to trust that the machine knows what it's doing. For example, I've always liked how my foreign publishers retitle, re-artwork, and reformat my books. My assumption is they know more about selling books to their demographic than I do.

Would I like to earn a bit more in royalties with each sale with 47North? Of course. Do I want to them feel as if they can give the book a huge push and move a zillion copies? Also of course.

Interrupt won't be on the front-of-store co-op racks in print like my Plague series, but 47North may achieve the same effect by stacking electrons on their bestseller display pages if I'm not mixing my metaphors too badly...? :)

Ryan, my agents sat down with the editing staff of Thomas & Mercer at BEA, Book Expo America, which was nicely timed after I'd sold 40,000 copies when I self-re-e-published the original short story of The Frozen Sky, 95% of those sales via Kindle.

T&M liked Interrupt but suggested it was a better fit with the 47North imprint. The book *is* pretty crazy, although you can see they've put it not only in the High Tech Science Fiction category but also the Mysteries, Thrillers & Suspense category. Smart. Big name authors like Rollins and Preston are writing books no less crazy. We're living in a science fiction world with mind-croggling advances in biotech, robotics, astrophysics, you name it. Give it a contemporary setting and it's a "science thriller," not sci fi.

Btw, "self-re-e-published" is a trademarked phrase for which everyone must PayPal me 1.7 cents with each use worldwide. :P

I believe Amazon's imprints are directly contacting many writers who've seen success via KDP as well as accepting agented submissions. I have yet to hear that anyone's found an avenue through which to directly contact them.

Sounds like a clusterfuck of epic proportions as usual. Very eloquent of me, I know! Guess I haven't had enough coffee today.

The overwhelming reason for Amazon's success if the customer service and ease of use.

What is there to not understand about instant gratification? The accurate understanding of the needs of readers and writers is far above and beyond any other service I've seen out there.

I'd be scrambling to explain why I am/should be loyal to a legacy publisher too. Once they stop trying to spin the situation, and actually address the underlying issues perhaps trad. pub. will once again rule the earth.

Alexandra, the new acronym looked like CEPAU to me... pronounced "Keh-pow," Clusterfuck of Epic Proportions As Usual... which can now replace the good old WWII-era SNAFU in the lexicon of 21st Century writers. ;)

Everyone will have to PayPal *you* 1.7 cents for each usage worldwide.

I just upgraded my Kindle to the Paperlight and got a discount for allowing advertisements on my screensaver (doesn't interfere with my reading). The book Interrupt by International Bestselling Author Jeff Carlson was on my screen while I read this post. Could be a sign or a case of VERY smart marketing. I bought it, either way.

I may not be the first to mention this, but I just read that during the RWA conference a couple weeks ago, where editors take pitches from aspiring writers (and in the past, getting an appointment was extremely difficult) there were over a hundred vacant slots.

Usually writers sign a waiting list, hoping for a vacancy and a chance to pitch. This year, crickets.

The same article said that not only were all of the self-publishing panels packed, but that there were a couple of panels with editors trying to tell aspiring writers what big publishing can do for them.

Editors and agents were actively pursuing writers instead of the other way around...

Gary, can you email me or hit me up on Twitter. The link to your website isn't working. It keeps showing me a carton of milk.

Rob, can you post a link to that article for us. Sounds like quite the reversal. Joe, hope you're not convulsing in a giant vat of Smug Sauce. But when you're right, you're right. (fyi it's in the condiments aisle along with the ketchup, mustard, and man-naise)